Thursday, February 20, 2014

Gender Identity Bill Passes Committee

A lot of people were pessimistic about this one. Though a majority of Maryland state Senators actually sponsored this bill, it needed to get through the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee in order to be voted on, and that committee was not necessarily friendly to the cause. The bill sat there for several weeks. Until today.

The Blade:

The Maryland Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee on Thursday approved a bill that would ban anti-transgender discrimination in the state.

The 8-3 vote took place slightly more than two weeks after lawmakers held a hearing on Senate Bill 212 that state Sen. Rich Madaleno (D-Montgomery County) introduced last month. The measure would ban discrimination based on gender identity and expression in employment, housing, public accommodation and credit.

Well, this is nice. Looks like a party-line vote in the committee. Not a surprise, the Republicans want to keep discrimination legal.

Gender Rights Maryland Executive Director Dana Beyer, who announced late last month she will challenge Madaleno in the June Democratic primary, specifically applauded Stone, Muse and Brochin who voted against a similar measure last year. She also thanked Raskin and attorney Jonathan Shurberg for securing the necessary votes on the committee to ensure SB 212's passage.

“I thank Senators Brochin, Muse and Stone for joining their fellow democrats and taking a stand for fairness and decency today,” Beyer told the Washington Blade. “It is much appreciated.”

Oh, and wow, this is surprising, the Citizens for Responsible Whatever still have a member.

Elaine McDermott of Maryland Citizens for a Responsible Government and Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Council are among those who spoke against the measure. The Maryland Catholic Conference and other organizations submitted testimony in opposition to SB 212.

And Peter Sprigg is not described as representing PFOX any more, interesting.

I have not seen any news about the not-my-shower types complaining about bathrooms. Maybe that has run its course. Let's see this thing sail through both sides of the legislature and get signed by the governor.

"The Republican-controlled Arizona state Senate voted along party lines Wednesday to pass Senate Bill 1062, a measure that would allow businesses to reject service to any customer based on the owners’ religious beliefs.

The bill reads:

"Exercise of religion" means the PRACTICE OR OBSERVANCE OF RELIGION, INCLUDING THE ability to act or refusal to act in a manner substantially motivated by a religious belief whether or not the exercise is compulsory or central to a larger system of religious belief.

Arizona Democrats, who argue the legislation is a way to legalize discrimination against LGBT individuals, sponsored eight amendments in an attempt to thwart the legislation -- all of which were rejected by Senate Republicans.

"SB 1062 permits discrimination under the guise of religious freedom," state Senate Democratic Leader Anna Tovar said in a statement Wednesday. "With the express consent of Republicans in this Legislature, many Arizonans will find themselves members of a separate and unequal class under this law because of their sexual orientation. This bill may also open the door to discriminate based on race, familial status, religion, sex, national origin, age or disability."

As testament to the bill’s mission, state Sen. Steve Yarbrough (R), one of three lawmakers sponsoring the bill, cited a 2013 New Mexico Supreme Court ruling that banned wedding photographers from refusing to shoot same-sex ceremonies, according to the Associated Press.

"This bill is not about allowing discrimination," Yarbrough said during a nearly two-hour debate on Wednesday. "This bill is about preventing discrimination against people who are clearly living out their faith."

Arizona Sen. Steve Farley (D), another opponent of the controversial bill, said the legislation could have a negative economic impact if it became law.

"I think this bill makes a statement ... that we don't welcome people here," Farley said. "This bill gets in the way, this bill sends the wrong message around the country and around the world."

“I believe our economy is strengthened by different people, and different backgrounds, and different beliefs, and different motivations, coming in and working together in our economy to make this state and this country stronger," he also said. "Discrimination hurts that. It hurts that in so many different ways."

Similar religious liberty bills, which have popped up in response to a series of federal court rulings overturning same-sex marriage bans, were recently quashed in Idaho, Kansas, South Dakota and Tennessee.

Arizona’s SB 1062 now heads to the Republican-majority state House, where it is expected to pass."

"WASHINGTON -- With marriage equality gaining support nationwide, opponents are scrambling to figure out how to stop, or at least delay, the seemingly inevitable flood of change. Increasingly losing in the courts and in the court of public opinion, state legislators are now introducing bills that would allow businesses, religious organizations and even public servants to not recognize same-sex marriage and discriminate against gay individuals.

"This is about giving a license to employees and businesses to discriminate against same-sex couples in all manner of anything that could even remotely be seen as related to the marriage itself," said Sarah Warbelow, state legislative director at the Human Rights Campaign. "So it's not just the wedding. An employee could say, 'I refuse to process benefits for a same-sex couple who's getting domestic partner benefits. ... A restaurant owner could say, 'Oh, you're here celebrating your anniversary? You need to leave, because I won't act in furtherance of your relationship.'"

Evan Hurst, associate director of the Chicago-based Truth Wins Out, equated the bills in an interview with Mother Jones to the "Jim Crow-style" laws in the South that targeted African Americans.

Kansas, Tennessee, South Dakota and Oregon have put forward the most explicit anti-gay bills. Other states, such as Arizona, Idaho and Maine, have introduced "religious freedom" measures that would have a similar effect.

They come after high-profile stories around the countries of businesses getting blowback after turning away same-sex couples and denying them wedding cakes, photography services and venues.

"It's backlash, for sure," said Warbelow, referring to the sudden spree of these bills. "It's a reaction to what's happening in the courts around the country, and frankly, the other legislatures as well."

So far, however, these bills aren't having much success. Lawmakers in Idaho, Kansas, South Dakota and Tennessee have all recently voted down or backtracked on such legislation. And on Tuesday, the Maine state House also rejected its legislation after the state Senate had done so earlier in the week...."

why do homosexuals want to patronize businesses that don't support them?

it's telling that homosexuals thought that they had the right to encourage people to boycott Chik-Fil-A but that the owners of Chik-Fil-A don't have right to boycott them

the owners of Chik-Fil-A obviously wouldn't do that, being evangelical Christians who would seek every opportunity to engage people who don't share their beliefs, but how hypocritical of gays to think only they deserve protection

Christians have protection, they are protected in every anti-discrimination law. There is no threat to them cause by serving gays and lesbians. Its gays and lesbians, particularly in small towns who will be harmed by being unable to get service for their most basic of needs. One christian when asked if the only grocery store in town refused to sell to gays crassly said "They can plant a garden and live off of that.

These business people are not themselves compelled to engage in the sexual activity they consider objectionable or restricted to being only able to marry a same sex partner Their objection is that it is sinful for others to engage in such activity. The interference with their right to act in accordance with their religious belief is trivial or insubstantial, in that it is interference that does not threaten actual religious beliefs or conduct. It can in no sense be considered an impostion for a business owner to do the same service he has done willingly hundreds or thousands of times before one more time for a gay or lesbian customer.

Its christians who think only they deserve protection. You never see christians advocating removing themselves from anti-discrimination laws, only gays and lesbians.

As Justice Anton Scalia says:

“Laws are made for the government of actions, and while they cannot interfere with mere religious belief and opinions, they may with practices. … Can a man excuse his practices to the contrary because of his religious belief? To permit this would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself.”“To make an individual’s obligation to obey such a law contingent upon the law’s coincidence with his religious beliefs, except where the State’s interest is “compelling” — permitting him, by virtue of his beliefs, “to become a law unto himself,” Reynolds v. United States, 98 U.S. at 167 — contradicts both constitutional tradition and common sense.”

Patrick said "That doesn’t answer my question. Do you believe and hold God to a standard of invulnerable fairness?

Bad anonymous said "I'm not going to engage in a theological discussion with someone who has made some pretty blasphemous utterances here".

What a pathetic excuse. You'd be happy to engage in such a discussion if you thought you could spout some specious rhetoric. You're running away because you know you can't justify your bigotry under the presumption of a just and fair god.

I'ts just like the research shows, bad anonymous is sadistic, psychopathic, and machiavellian and he can't be reached through appeals to justice, fairness, or right and wrong.

The person who wrote this is a college student. Perhaps there is hope for us after all.

"Dear American liberals, leftists, social progressives, socialists, Marxists and Obama supporters, et al: We have stuck together since the late 1950's for the sake of the kids, but the whole of this latest election process has made me realize that I want a divorce. I know we tolerated each other for many years for the sake of future generations, but sadly, this relationship has clearly run its course.

Our two ideological sides of America cannot and will not ever agree on what is right for us all, so let's just end it on friendly terms. We can smile and chalk it up to irreconcilable differences and go our own way.

Here is an our separation agreement:

--Our two groups can equitably divide up the country by landmass each taking a similar portion. That will be the difficult part, but I am sure our two sides can come to a friendly agreement. After that, it should be relatively easy! Our respective representatives can effortlessly divide other assets since both sides have such distinct and disparate tastes.

--We don't like redistributive taxes so you can keep them.

--You are welcome to the liberal judges and the ACLU.--Since you hate guns and war, we'll take our firearms, the cops, the NRA and the military.

--We'll take the nasty, smelly oil industry and the coal mines, and you can go with wind, solar and biodiesel.

--You can keep Oprah, Michael Moore and Rosie O'Donnell. You are, however, responsible for finding a bio-diesel vehicle big enough to move all three of them.

--We'll keep "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" and "The National Anthem."

--I'm sure you'll be happy to substitute "Imagine", "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing", "Kum Ba Ya" or "We Are the World".

--We'll practice trickle-down economics and you can continue to give trickle up poverty your best shot.

--Since it often so offends you, we'll keep our history, our name and our flag.

Would you agree to this? If so, please pass it along to other like-minded liberal and conservative patriots and if you do not agree, just hit delete. In the spirit of friendly parting, I'll bet you might think about which one of us will need whose help in 15 years.

Bad anonymous said "few people would refuse to make a profit off homosexuals but those that want to should be able to...how hypocritical of gays to think only they deserve protection.

The christians' proposed law would remove all protection from gays and then only christians would be protected by anti-discrimination laws. Once again, Christians expect to have rights they won't give to gays and lesbians.

Bad anonymous said "it's telling that homosexuals thought that they had the right to encourage people to boycott Chik-Fil-A but that the owners of Chik-Fil-A don't have right to boycott them".

Gays and lesbian business owners are obligated by law to serve christians, by the same token christians should have to serve gays and lesbians. Of course the idea that anyone should be obligated to patronize a business like Chik-Fil-A is absurd but those who make a living off of society are rightfully legally obligated to serve all of society.

"Passed over due to negligence and possible discrimination, 24 veterans will receive the Medal of Honor from President Obama on March 18. Of the 24, only three are alive to accept the award. The other 21 will be honored posthumously.

The Army Times reports:

Each of the soldiers was previously recognized by award of the Distinguished Service Cross, the nation’s second highest military award. That award will be upgraded to the Medal of Honor in recognition of their gallantry, intrepidity and heroism above and beyond the call of duty.

In 2002 Congress passed the Defense Authorization Act, calling for a review of Hispanic and Jewish soldiers who possibly were denied the medal due to discrimination at the time.

The act was amended during the military's review as several other soldiers of neither Jewish nor Hispanic descent were deemed worthy of the Medal of Honor.

All together, veterans from three wars — World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War — will be honored by the president.

The three living recipients of the award all performed their heroic acts in the Vietnam war. They are: Master Sgt. Jose Rodela, who inspired his unit to defend against a vicious enemy attack; Specialist Santiago Erevia, who protected wounded soldiers and singlehandedly destroyed multiple bunkers; and Sgt. 1st Class Melvin Morris, who charged into enemy fire despite being wounded multiple times to rescue a fallen comrade."

"What a pathetic excuse. You'd be happy to engage in such a discussion if you thought you could spout some specious rhetoric. You're running away because you know you can't justify your bigotry under the presumption of a just and fair god"

Patrick, the mush-head from the Gulf Coast, suddenly brings up this question out of the air

he's just trying to orchestra a conversation, so I'm not playing along

if he wants to say something, that's his right

on the past, he has made some very blasphemous posts

I won't be participating in his game

this is scriptural

let me know if you'd like the reference

"Gays and lesbian business owners are obligated by law to serve christians, by the same token christians should have to serve gays and lesbians"

gee, I thought I was being tolerant when I patronized businesses run by deviants

if they don't to do business with me, that's fine

"Of course the idea that anyone should be obligated to patronize a business like Chik-Fil-A is absurd"

oh, I agree

"but those who make a living off of society are rightfully legally obligated to serve all of society"

no, those who make a living rightfully have a right to choose whom to do business with

Jesus Christ would absolutely bake a cake for a gay person. He’d bake a cake for a straight person. He’d bake a cake for a girl, a boy, a person who isn’t sure what they are, a black person, a white person — Jesus would bake that cake if it, in some way large or small, drew that person closer to Him.

And Christians should too.

Christians should show love and compassion to gays, straights, and everyone else. Christians should show God’s love in hopes of drawing people to a relationship with Christ. 95% of that may just be relationship building, but it should still be done.

If a Christian owns a bakery or a florist shop or a photography shop or a diner, a Christian should no more be allowed to deny service to a gay person than to a black person. It is against the tenets of 2000 years of orthodox Christian faith, no matter how poorly some Christians have practiced their faith over two millennia.

And honestly, I don’t know that I know anyone who disagrees with any of this.

The disagreement comes on one issue only — should a Christian provide goods and services to a gay wedding. That’s it. We’re not talking about serving a meal at a restaurant. We’re not talking about baking a cake for a birthday party. We’re talking about a wedding, which millions of Christians view as a sacrament of the faith and other, mostly Protestant Christians, view as a relationship ordained by God to reflect a holy relationship.

This slope is only slippery if you grease it with hypotheticals not in play.

There are Christians who have no problem providing goods and services for a gay marriage. Some of them are fine with gay marriage. Some of them think gay marriage is wrong, but they still have no problem providing goods and services.

Other Christians, including a significant number of Catholic and Protestant preachers, believe that a gay marriage is a sinful corruption of a relationship God himself ordained. Because they try to glorify God through their work, they believe they cannot participate in a wedding service. Yes, because they believe they are glorifying God in their work and view it as a ministry, they view providing goods and services as a way to advance, even in a small way, God’s kingdom.

Herein lies the dispute of the day. The latter group does not stand in the way of the former group providing cakes, flowers, and pictures for a gay wedding. Some of the former, however, believe the government should compel the latter group to violate their conscience. They only see the transaction through the customer’s eyes as if the vendors are passive participants.

That’s the problem.

We are not talking about race. We are not talking about restaurants. We are talking about a specific ceremony people of faith believe God himself created and ordained. Should the state force people to violate their conscience in that regard?

It is not staggering that there are aggrieved gay rights activists who think the state should be able to force people to recognize as normal that which most Christians view as sinful. What is staggering is the number of Christians who apparently think the State has the right to decide and enforce this issue.

You might think Jesus would bake a cake for a gay wedding. I think you are wrong because I don’t Christ would collaborate in sin. But are you really going to tell the millions of Christians in the United States who think otherwise that not only are they wrong, but the state should be able to force your opinion of what Jesus would do on them? In your pride, you might think 2000 years of Christian orthodoxy and the majority of practicing Christians in the world today are wrong — but don’t think among people of practicing Christian faith you are in the majority.

I understand if you are not a believer and define yourself based on your sexual preference that you think the government should legitimize you by forcing others to treat you in a particular way. But it boggles my mind to think any Christian should want the government to force their view of Christianity on another believer.

If you think the government should be able to force Christians to provide goods and services to a gay wedding or risk losing their business, why not command a preacher’s service? If a Christian baker cannot opt out, why should a preacher be able to opt out? And why not take from churches their tax exempt status if they fail to participate?

"Stridently homophobic right-wing pundit and Fox News contributor Erick Erickson is scrapping with a fellow member of the Fox News universe again — and this time, it’s theological.

As flagged by Luke Brinker of Media Matters, Erickson engaged in a Twitter back-and-forth with Kirsten Powers over her recent USA Today column criticizing Kansas Republicans for nearly passing a bill that would make it legal for private and public sector workers to refuse to provide services to those they suspected of being gay.

Powers is an evangelical Christian, but nevertheless felt the Kansas proposal (which is being copied by Republican lawmakers throughout the country) was a mistake and would amount to a new, anti-gay form of Jim Crow. As part of her argument, Powers notes that Christians work with people they consider sinners all the time, including serving “unrepentant murders through prison ministry.”

Erickson wasn’t having any of it, telling Powers over Twitter that she was mistaken and that any business owner who decided to refuse services to those involved in a same-sex wedding or marriage were actually abstaining from “aiding and abetting” sin."

what we should all agree on is that when the government intervenes in personal relationships and imposes their judgment on who we should associate with or perform services for, it's evil repression, and, literally, slavery

sexual deviants have no real problem finding someone to bake them a cake in our society

if, however, someone is so repugnant, because they're sexually deviant, or for any other reason, that no one wants to bake them a cake, and society deems it important that they have access to cakes, the government can start a cake shoppe for repugnant people

this whole thing is another example of homosexuals trying to impose their fringe beliefs on others, by forcing everyone to act as if they are normal

this is all started when society began to tolerate them and now they want us all to serve them

what we should all agree on is that when the government intervenes in personal relationships and imposes their judgment on who we should associate with or perform services for, it's evil repression, and, literally, slavery

negroes have no real problem finding someone to bake them a cake in our society

if, however, someone is so repugnant, because they're negroes, or for any other reason, that no one wants to bake them a cake, and society deems it important that they have access to cakes, the government can start a cake shoppe for negro people

this whole thing is another example of negroes trying to impose their equal beliefs on others, by forcing everyone to act as if they are equal

this is all started when society began to tolerate them and now they want us all to serve them

When my parents bought the house in which I grew up, they were required to sign a codicil that they would not resale the house to a Jewish person. They refused of course, and the sellers sold them the house anyway.

Would Arizona's law protect such practices?

It seems a very dangerous road for our country to go down to me, given our extensive history of discrimination.

"It seems a very dangerous road for our country to go down to me, given our extensive history of discrimination"

yes it is, Robert

but there is where the gay agenda has taken us

lunatic fringe gay advocates have tried to impose their worldview on others and started us all down this road

why not just have a society where everything is permissible, other than violating real rights, and then let everyone take their chances about whether people will like them and want to be involved with them?

there's no easy way to be free

btw, the demand for laws like this is an admission that gays wouldn't be able to survive without them because their presence is so disagreeable that no one would want to go near them

"what we should all agree on is that when the government intervenes in personal relationships and imposes their judgment on who we should associate with or perform services for, it's evil repression, and, literally, slavery

negroes have no real problem finding someone to bake them a cake in our society"

that's true

"negroes", as you call them, no longer need laws forcing white people to bake them cakes

"if, however, someone is so repugnant, because they're negroes, or for any other reason, that no one wants to bake them a cake, and society deems it important that they have access to cakes, the government can start a cake shoppe for negro people"

there are few people who find negroes repugnant but why would negroes want to give such people business anyway?

"this whole thing is another example of negroes trying to impose their equal beliefs on others, by forcing everyone to act as if they are equal"

"negroes" is not a behavior or desire, it is a physical characteristic

"this is all started when society began to tolerate them and now they want us all to serve them

the backlash is coming

it was always inevitable

because negoes, by definition, have no discretion"

as a physical characteristic and not a behavior, there are no elements of character that automatically attach to it

The argument that only “physical characteristics” should be viable targets for anti-discrimination laws (once again) completely ignores that fact that this is simply not how are anti-discrimination laws are written.

One can easily choose to be a Muslim, Mormon, Catholic, or Hindu, and are anti-discrimination laws will apply to you in full force. Trying to make sure your house isn’t sold to a Muslim is a good way to end up with a lawsuit. Muslim behavior is protected (theoretically at least) as well as Mormon behavior.

In some localities, even political party affiliation is specifically written into the anti-discrimination laws. Again, this is a CHOICE, not a physical characteristic.

We cannot allow religious groups to use the force of the government to marginalize folks whose behavior SOME religious folks find objectionable. We still have freedom of religion in this country, and in some aspects at least, that means we have to have freedom FROM religion. It is one of the major contributors to the advancement of our society.

The founding forefathers enshrined freedom of religion into our constitution because they are keenly aware that dominant Christian powers had a nasty habit of persecuting those with beliefs, actions, and behaviors conflicted with their own interpretation of the bible. It led to centuries of bloody conflict on the old continent. Once the Christians had all but entirely eliminated the native non-Christians from this continent, a relatively peaceful and coexistent ensued between the various flavors of Christianity that took over the stolen land. Other countries, even today, are still embroiled by sectarian violence by religious communities vying for the most political and economic power.

Avoiding this conflict, and the ensuing loss of lives, property, and the structures of society itself have allowed this country to flourish for over two centuries.

The discrimination laws such as the one in Arizona would allow discrimination against anyone for virtually any reason. This certainly isn't just ahout refusing to provide service to gay weddings. They would also unequally apply, giving special rights to religious people that atheists are denied - that alone makes them unconstitutional. There is no justifiable reason for privileging religious beliefs over non-religious beliefs.

If anyone believes doing something or not doing something would violate their religious beliefs, whether or not their religion explicitly states such beliefs they would be able to ignore the law unless the state has a compelling interest in enforcing it and the law is the least coercive way of achieving that state goal.

The wording of "compelling state interest" is so loosely defined that very little could be considered as such. If you said your religion required you to stone gays to death the state could probably intervene and say it has a compelling interest in stopping murder and the law against it is the least coercive way of achieving that, but if a person wanted to refuse to sell a house to a jew, or a doctor didn't want to treat a gay person, or if bank didn't want to give a loan to a black person, all they would have to do is say doing so conflicts with their religious beliefs (regardless of whether or not there is any religious doctrine to back that up) and they would get to ignore the law.

As Anton Scalia said, allowing people to ignore laws when they conflict with their stated religious beliefs makes each person (except atheists) a law unto themselves. These laws are obviously unconstitutional and if passed will be brought down on the first court challenge so this is all a moot point anyway.

These laws are being introduced solely to score political points. The lawmakers know they won't stand constitutional scrutiny and will be struck down but in the meantime they can play up how they are "standing up for religious freedom" and when the laws are struck down they can rail about how "activist judges" are subverting the will of the people. Its a win/win situation for unscrupulous politicians.

Bad anonymous said "religion is accorded special protection as compensation because the Constitution discriminates against it you can make any argument you want for any policy but if that argument is religious, it is considered unconstitutional there is no other argument discriminated against in such a manner".

And of course bad anonymous is lying again. The first amendment only applies to the government coercing people to do, or not do things for religious reasons as the government cannot enforce or prohibit any religious practice. Individuals can make whatever religious argument they like until the cows come home and the government can't stop them. What individuals cannot do is force others to live by their religion.

These business people are not themselves compelled to engage in the sexual activity they consider objectionable or restricted to being only able to marry a same sex partner Their objection is that it is sinful for others to engage in such activity. The interference with their right to act in accordance with their religious belief is trivial or insubstantial, in that it is interference that does not threaten actual religious beliefs or conduct. It can in no sense be considered an imposition for a business owner to do the same service he has done willingly hundreds or thousands of times before one more time for a gay or lesbian customer.

Comparing this to slavery is the most extreme sort of absurd hyperbole. When you're a slave you don't get paid and you don't have a right to quit your job and find another. If a business owner doesn't want to abide by anti-discrimination laws he can quit his job and go find another - no one is going to force him to run a business if abiding by the regulations offends his delicate religious sensibilities.

The orderly conduct of society requires that businesses follow certain regulations whether they like them or not. Having to bake a cake for a gay wedding is no more slavery than having to collect sales tax for the government or treat your chemical waste before dispersing it in the water is slavery.

WASHINGTON -- Members of Arizona's congressional delegation, including its two Republican U.S. senators, are speaking out against the controversial anti-gay legislation known as SB 1062, urging Gov. Jan Brewer (R) to veto it.

On Monday, Sens. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) tweeted that they oppose the legislation, which the state House and Senate passed last week. The bill would allow business owners to refuse service to same-sex couples on the grounds of "religious freedom."

so if a person went into a bakery run by muslims, and wanted a cake with the image of the prophet muhammed on it (which is against the muslim religion) you would also feel that the muslim bakery would have to produce that cake ?

how about if a Westboro family member wanted a homosexual baker to bake a cake that said "God Hates Fags"?

should the homosexual be forced to?

I personally don't think so

telling people who they have to do business with is more than a regulation

if one member of society can force another to perform services for him, that's slavery

Uganda is fed up with homosexual behavior and is dropping its lenient policies:

ENTEBBE, Uganda - Uganda's president signed an anti-gay bill Monday that provides for prison sentences ranging up to life behind bars, saying it is needed because the West is promoting homosexuality in Africa. Arrests of gays were expected as a result, one politician said.

The new law goes into effect immediately and calls for first-time offenders to be sentenced to 14 years in jail. It sets life imprisonment as the maximum penalty for "aggravated homosexuality," defined as repeated gay sex between consenting adults and acts involving a minor, a disabled person or where one partner is infected with HIV.

"The founding forefathers enshrined freedom of religion into our constitution because they are keenly aware that dominant Christian powers had a nasty habit of persecuting those with beliefs, actions, and behaviors conflicted with their own interpretation of the bible"

cinco, we'll leave your nasty habits to the imagination but you have a bias against Christianity

all religions, as defined as one's idea of God, have persecution of other beliefs in their history

“cinco, we'll leave your nasty habits to the imagination but you have a bias against Christianity”

No need to leave it to the imagination Anon, I’ll just tell you. I have the nasty habit of turning off all the lights when people leave a room. This annoys my Mom terribly when she leaves a room for 5 minutes and then has to come back and turn the lights on.

There, I said it. Acknowledging there is a problem is half the battle.

My “bias against Christianity” is well earned. It comes after decades of being verbally harassed and assaulted by Christians. I was even assaulted by the drunk valedictorian at my Catholic High School. On the other hand, the Muslims I’ve met personally have been nothing but very kind to me. Go figure.

“all religions, as defined as one's idea of God, have persecution of other beliefs in their history

that includes, especially, atheism”

There you go again, like many religious folks, trying to redefine atheism as a religion. And from one who complains so much about the “redefinition” of certain terms. You’d think you’d be more careful than that. I guess if you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Let’s look at the definitions of each term:

Religion:

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/religion?s=t

re•li•gion [ri-lij-uhn] noun1. a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, especially when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs.

2. a specific fundamental set of beliefs and practices generally agreed upon by a number of persons or sects: the Christian religion; the Buddhist religion.

3. the body of persons adhering to a particular set of beliefs and practices: a world council of religions.

Although both definitions include the term “belief” and at least allude to a God, they are really very different things.

If you still don’t think so, than please explain to me why not believing in Santa Claus or the Easter bunny is not a religion, but not believing in God IS a religion.

“Christianity has been the most tolerant of the religious beliefs”

Buy a history book Anon; I’ll even chip in for it.

When you look back over the last few hundred years and see how many Jews, Muslims, Native Americans (in North, Middle, and South America), and other non-Christians have been killed by Christians, and how many Christians have been killed by those other groups, I believe Christians come out way “on top” of the attributable deaths category. Then of course there are the other Christians they’ve killed in arguing over “Protestant” vs. “Catholic,” and the couple centuries of slave trade they promoted – which involved the deaths of thousands as they were transported between Africa and the New World. “Tolerant” people don’t have such a nasty habit of killing the people who are not like them.

“cinco, religion is accorded special protection as compensation because the Constitution discriminates against it”

I’m calling BS on this one Anon. The first time religion is mentioned in a federal civil rights act is 1957:

“Public Law 85-315 September 9, 1957. 71 Stat 634-638. Sec. 101 sets up a six-member Civil Rights Commission in the Executive Branch to gather information on deprivation of citizens' voting rights based on color, race, religion or national origin, the legal background, and laws and policies of the federal government. It was set up to take testimony or written complaints from individuals about difficulties in registering and voting. Not later than two years from date of enactment of this law the Commission will submit a final report to the President and the Congress, and will cease to exist.”

“The Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Pub.L. 88–352, 78 Stat. 241, enacted July 2, 1964) is a landmark piece of civil rights legislation in the United States[4] that outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin.[5] It ended unequal application of voter registration requirements and racial segregation in schools, at the workplace and by facilities that served the general public (known as "public accommodations").”

These make absolutely no mention of any “special protection” because of a perceived “Constitutional discriminat[ion]”

These laws were passed to address problems with voting, workplaces, and schools. If you have any contemporaneous documentation such as a court finding to refute that, we’d love to hear it. Until then, your remark is simply revisionist religious conservative propaganda.

“you can make any argument you want for any policy but if that argument is religious, it is considered unconstitutional”

You need to pay more attention to your CRG friends when they go to Annapolis to fight non-discrimination laws. They bring up religion on a regular basis, so our side – some times we’ve even had ministers there. Their speech / arguments have never been considered unconstitutional.

“there is no other argument discriminated against in such a manner”

Religious reasons are typically avoided for written law because they have a history of being arbitrary and capricious. Being burned at the stake for translating the bible from Latin into English is my favorite example, but there are others. After a few centuries of this kind of theological abuse by religious leaders, society finally said “ENOUGH!” and slowly started wresting legal authority away from the churches.

We are a far better society for it. Look at either contemporary or historical theocracies and you’ll see we’ve been born in a very fortunate place and time.

Robert, a cake may not be important. Sitting in the back of the bus was not a big deal, either, but I am glad somebody made an issue out of it. You have to draw the line somewhere, and it may be that the most personal insults, the ones that stab you in the heart, are the most important ones, even if there is no great amount of money or prestige involved.

One can always find someone else to bake one's cake. I think these people are making a big deal about feeling insulted. Personally, in terms of bad press and backlash, I think the harm done is much greater than the benefit gained. It's bad strategy, and selfish. It makes it harder to pass ENDA, for example, and jobs matter much more than cakes, in my book.

"Robert, a cake may not be important. Sitting in the back of the bus was not a big deal, either, but I am glad somebody made an issue out of it. You have to draw the line somewhere, and it may be that the most personal insults, the ones that stab you in the heart, are the most important ones, even if there is no great amount of money or prestige involved."

when you start getting government involved in resolving personal insults, your freedom won't last long

if you think it's an important issue, work to raise consciousness and use personal suasion

using the power of the government to supervise personal relationships never changes anything

btw, comparing the situation homosexuals face in 21st century America to the situation of blacks in the 1950s is a personal insult to African Americans

using the power of the government to supervise personal relationships never changes anything

Oh brother!

"After Loving v. Virginia, the number of interracial marriages continued to increase across the United States and in the South. In Georgia, for instance, the number of interracial marriages increased from 21 in 1967 to 115 in 1970. At the national level, 0.4% of marriages were interracial in 1960, and 2.0% in 1980. In the 2010 census, 10% of opposite-sex married couples had partners of a different race, 25 times more than in 1960."

"a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe"

atheists have a certain viewpoint on these that makes them a religion

they believe that the atheist viewpoint is important to society and are aggressive in pushing their viewpoint on others

they evangelize for their viewpoint, advertise to get the message out, sue schools that imply that God does exist, and in societies where atheism is the official state religion, they have persecuted and attacked believers

"When you look back over the last few hundred years and see how many Jews, Muslims, Native Americans (in North, Middle, and South America), and other non-Christians have been killed by Christians, and how many Christians have been killed by those other groups, I believe Christians come out way “on top” of the attributable deaths category"

Anon reasoned: "the constitution says the government cannot respect the establishment of religion / it can respect the establishment of anything else / that's bias against religion"

The Constitution says this: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion..." This means that the government cannot establish a religion or give preference to one over the other. It does not mean that the government does not respect religion. The word "respecting" means "with respect to."

This is a bias in favor of religion. Government can establish anything else, if you want to look at it that way, but it cannot establish a religion or show preference for one over another. So you can have one group claiming their all-knowing and all-powerful bearded man in the sky is the creator and father of all the universe, and another group claiming that their bearded man in the sky is the creator and destroyer of all good and evil and arbiter of everything under the sun, and the government has to treat them both as if they made equal sense. And in a way, I guess they do.

For some reason, religion, that most irrational expression of human ignorance, got special treatment from the Founding Fathers. Between the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause they have created a gazillion-dollar industry for the legal profession.

Schools that are operated by the government may teach facts that are based on evidence and logic. They may not teach fantasies that are based on religious beliefs.

The government permits all religion, the crazier the better, but it does not establish religion or show preference for one unsupported delusion over another. Schools are run by the government and are bound by the Constitution.

"Schools that are operated by the government may teach facts that are based on evidence and logic. They may not teach fantasies that are based on religious beliefs.

The government permits all religion, the crazier the better, but it does not establish religion or show preference for one unsupported delusion over another. Schools are run by the government and are bound by the Constitution.

That's just common sense."

if you'll the ruling in Pennsylvania, you'll find it didn't matter what the facts were

if the facts support religion, this court said it was unconstitutional to teach it

The Bill of Rights ensures American freedoms, including the freedom from someone else using the government to impose their religion on us. If you want to have a private religious school you are perfectly free to do so, but a public school is bound to avoid delusional stuff like "intelligent design" and proselytizing material endorsing religious taboos regarding sexual orientation.

It is ironic to see conservatives complaining about the freedoms guaranteed them by the Constitution. The Founding Fathers realized there was bound to be nuttiness wherever religion flourished, and they decided just to stay out of it. You are free to believe in whatever hallucination pleases you, but you can't make the government -- which serves you and me equally -- promote your religious irrationality.

Personally, I think if churches were taxed like everybody else, religion in the US would dry up and blow away. It's just a tax shelter at this point.

"On March 20, 1924 the Virginia General Assembly passed two laws that had arisen out of contemporary concerns about eugenics and race: SB 219, entitled "The Racial Integrity Act" and SB 281, "An ACT to provide for the sexual sterilization of inmates of State institutions in certain cases", henceforth referred to as "The Sterilization Act".

The Racial Integrity Act required that a racial description of every person be recorded at birth and divided society into only two classifications: white and colored (essentially all other, which included numerous American Indians). It defined race by the "one-drop rule", defining as "colored" persons with any African or Native American ancestry. It also expanded the scope of Virginia's ban on interracial marriage (anti-miscegenation law) by criminalizing all marriages between white persons and non-white persons.

The Sterilization Act provided for compulsory sterilization of persons deemed to be "feebleminded," including the "insane, idiotic, imbecile, or epileptic."

These two laws were Virginia's implementation of Harry Laughlin's "Model Eugenical Sterilization Law", published two years earlier in 1922. The Sterilization Act was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in the case Buck v. Bell 274 U.S. 200 (1927). This had appealed the order for compulsory sterilization of Carrie Buck, who was an inmate in the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, and her daughter and mother.

Together these laws implemented the practice of "scientific eugenics" in Virginia."

Virginia's state government most certainly did intervene in personal relationships by "CRIMINALIZING ALL MARRIAGES BETWEEN WHITE AND NON-WHITE PERSONS."

This is far from being only about cakes or gay weddings despite any bigots claim to the contrary. These laws permit any and all discrimination against gays and there will certainly be gay individuals placed in untenable circumstances because no one in their local is willing to provide them with critical services.

The truth is that none of these people oppose serving gays for religious reasons, that's just a facade to attempt to provide some legitimacy to their bigotry. People are no more concerned about religious bans on gayness then they are concerned about religious bans on Red Lobster and those who eat or work at Red Lobster.

There are only two real reasons people want to discriminate against gays:

1)Gays are icky.2)They're struggling to suppress their own same sex attractions.

People only bring up relgion as an excuse they hope will bring more support for their desire to discriminate - this isn't about religion in any way.

In a colossal “oh by the way” revelation, last Friday afternoon the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), a federal agency under the United States Department of Health and Human Services (that would be the executive branch run by President Obama), quietly released a report exposing the fact that under Obamacare, two-thirds of Americans who work at small businesses will see their insurance premiums increase. So this report – which is more than two years late – says over 11 million American workers will have higher health insurance premiums because of Obamacare. Despite the administration’s attempts to, as House Speaker John Boehner put it, “delay and deemphasize” the report, we now have it straight from the Obama administration that Obamacare will raise health-insurance premiums for American workers. That is a far cry from Obama’s 2008 campaign promise that families would see lower health insurance premiums – $2,500 lower, to be exact – under Obamacare.

When you want to hide something in Washington, you release it on a Friday afternoon – but this latest Obamacare revelation is too big to ignore. Remarkably, there have been so many horrific disclosures of the deceit, inaccuracies, inadequacies and flaws in Obamacare that this latest report hasn’t stirred much outrage. On its face, the fact that the CMS says 11 million workers will see their health-insurance premiums increase should be a banner headline. But in the Obamacare narrative, disclosures like this have pretty much become routine. And that’s what the White House wants the media to think – that there’s no more juice in reporting another Obamacare lie or providing details about how this law is coming apart, undermining health care, killing jobs, decreasing American household income, leaving the uninsured uninsured, etc.

When challenged on the negative impacts of Obamacare, the White House Obamacare media strategy appears to be either to just deny the accuracy of obvious facts or to shrug and assure the compliant media that there is nothing new here. They are counting on the media watchdogs becoming bored with the Obamacare debacle.

There is no evidence that the Obama administration has any intention of rebooting its health-care policy or actually trying to fix the damage done by Obamacare. Instead, it’s decided to go with a strategy that my old boss, Lee Atwater, would love: “That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.” No matter what the truth is, or what harm is done, it seems like this administration is dealing with the fallout from Obamacare by stiff-arming Congress and the press and giving the voters the finger.

They are making a bet that this approach will yield better 2014 election results than telling the truth, admitting mistakes and fixing problems.

In a colossal “oh by the way” revelation, last Friday afternoon the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), a federal agency under the United States Department of Health and Human Services (that would be the executive branch run by President Obama), quietly released a report exposing the fact that under Obamacare, two-thirds of Americans who work at small businesses will see their insurance premiums increase. So this report – which is more than two years late – says over 11 million American workers will have higher health insurance premiums because of Obamacare. Despite the administration’s attempts to, as House Speaker John Boehner put it, “delay and deemphasize” the report, we now have it straight from the Obama administration that Obamacare will raise health-insurance premiums for American workers. That is a far cry from Obama’s 2008 campaign promise that families would see lower health insurance premiums – $2,500 lower, to be exact – under Obamacare.

When you want to hide something in Washington, you release it on a Friday afternoon – but this latest Obamacare revelation is too big to ignore. Remarkably, there have been so many horrific disclosures of the deceit, inaccuracies, inadequacies and flaws in Obamacare that this latest report hasn’t stirred much outrage. On its face, the fact that the CMS says 11 million workers will see their health-insurance premiums increase should be a banner headline. But in the Obamacare narrative, disclosures like this have pretty much become routine. And that’s what the White House wants the media to think – that there’s no more juice in reporting another Obamacare lie or providing details about how this law is coming apart, undermining health care, killing jobs, decreasing American household income, leaving the uninsured uninsured, etc.

When challenged on the negative impacts of Obamacare, the White House Obamacare media strategy appears to be either to just deny the accuracy of obvious facts or to shrug and assure the compliant media that there is nothing new here. They are counting on the media watchdogs becoming bored with the Obamacare debacle.

There is no evidence that the Obama administration has any intention of rebooting its health-care policy or actually trying to fix the damage done by Obamacare. Instead, it’s decided to go with a strategy that my old boss, Lee Atwater, would love: “That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.” No matter what the truth is, or what harm is done, it seems like this administration is dealing with the fallout from Obamacare by stiff-arming Congress and the press and giving the voters the finger.

They are making a bet that this approach will yield better 2014 election results than telling the truth, admitting mistakes and fixing problems.

Newsflash, triple-poster: Anyone who has worked for small companies (like I have for the past decade and a half) have seen their insurance rates increase by rates like 15 to 25% EACH AND EVERY YEAR. Saying that they’re going to go up next year is like saying it’s going to rain next week, or the week after that. Private insurance companies have been gouging consumers for decades. Do some research for yourself. We used to use United Health Care. I googled the CEO of that company several years ago. His net worth exceed that of a lot of small countries. I don’t mind people being millionaires, but when you become a billionaire leaching off of sick people, I find that terribly distasteful.

“if I don't feel like baking a cake for anyone for any reason, that's within my natural common sense rights

I really don't need an excuse

this latest gambit by homosexuals to impose themselves on everyone may lead to some serious problems

people denied their rights by a repressive government may rise up, if they feel treated like slaves”

You must have a degree in drama with all of those histrionics. Interestingly, so does Peter Sprigg.

Gay caterers and bakers have been forced to cook for obnoxious religious people for decades. They don’t complain because the non-discrimination laws protecting religious people are not in their favor. They know they would lose any battle on that front. Now it’s time to level the playing field, and make the “slavery” reciprocal.

....Nearly 6-in-10 (58%) Americans agree that religious groups are alienating young people by being too judgmental on gay and lesbian issues. Seven-in-ten (70%) Millennials believe that religious groups are alienating young adults by being too judgmental on gay and lesbian issues. Only among members of the Silent Generation do less than a majority (43%) believe religious groups are alienating young people by being too judgmental about gay and lesbian issues.

Among Americans who left their childhood religion and are now religiously unaffiliated, about one-quarter say negative teachings about or treatment of gay and lesbian people was a somewhat important (14%) or very important (10%) factor in their decision to disaffiliate. Among Millennials who no longer identify with their childhood religion, nearly one-third say that negative teachings about, or treatment of, gay and lesbian people was either a somewhat important (17%) or very important (14%) factor in their disaffiliation from religion.

-Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Americans are also far more likely than other Americans to report leaving their childhood religion. Like Americans overall, few LGBT Americans were raised outside a formal religious tradition (8% vs. 7%). However, nearly 4-in-10 (37%) LGBT Americans are now unaffiliated, compared to 21% of Americans. Overall, roughly 3-in-10 (31%) LGBT Americans left their childhood religion to become religiously unaffiliated.

The current survey, using self-identification, finds 5.1% of the adult population identifies as either gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender. Notably, Americans overestimate the size of the LGBT population by a factor of 4 (20% median estimate). Only 14% of Americans accurately estimate the gay and lesbian population at 5% or less.

Today, majorities of Americans say that transgender Americans (71%), gay and lesbian people (68%), and people with HIV or AIDS (53%) face a lot of discrimination in the United States.

-Roughly two-thirds (66%) of Americans agree bullying of gay and lesbian teenagers is a major problem in schools today, while nearly one-quarter (23%) disagrees. The belief that bullying of gay and lesbian youth is a major problem in schools is broadly shared across partisan and religious lines.

The percentage of Americans who believe AIDS might be God’s punishment for immoral sexual behavior has fallen dramatically over time. Fourteen percent of Americans agree with the idea that AIDS might be God’s punishment for immoral sexual behavior, while 81% disagree. In 1992, more than twice as many Americans (36%) agreed that AIDS might be God’s punishment for immoral sexual behavior while fewer than 6-in-10 (57%) disagreed.

Americans are significantly more likely to say those who are living with HIV or AIDS in the United States became infected because of irresponsible behavior than to say the same about those living with HIV or AIDS in the developing world.

-Nearly two-thirds (65%) of Americans say that people with HIV or AIDS in the United States became infected because of irresponsible personal behavior, while just one-quarter (25%) say they became infected through no fault of their own.-By contrast, only about 4-in-10 (41%) Americans believe that people who have contracted HIV in the developing world did so because of irresponsible behavior. Nearly half (48%) say they contracted the disease through no fault of their own."

Bad anonymous said "people denied their rights by a repressive government may rise up, if they feel treated like slaves".

Being required to serve all people if you run a business is no more being treated like a slave than a business owner being required to collect sales tax for the government is being treated like a slave. Slaves don't get paid and can't quit their job. If a business owner doesn't want to abide by the regulations required of businesses no one will force him to stay in that job - its nothing like slavery.

Business owners have no more right to rise up against the government for being required to serve everyone than they have a right to rise up against the government because it requires them to treat their toxic waste before dumping it. Thinking such requirements are "treating you like a slave" in no way means you are being treated like a slave. All individuals must make some concessions to society to make for a cooperative, productive, and just world.

Business owners aren't being required to engage in sex they find objectionable or to only be able to marry a same sex partner, their objection is that they don't want others doing that. This restriction on their freedom is trivial or inconsequential and in no way can be considered to a real impediment to act in accordance with their religious beliefs.

The idea that being able to refuse service to gay people is an essential part of religious liberty is absurd, religious people are no more in need of the ability to discriminate against gays then they are in need of the ability to stone gays to death. If religious people don't want to abide by the rules of society they can move to a desert island in international waters and declare themselves a country unto themselves.

Bad anonymous said ""negroes" is not a behavior or desire, it is a physical characteristic".

Being same sex attracted is an innate harmless characgteristic of a person. Discriminating against gays is no different than discriminating against black people.

“Laws are made for the government of actions, and while they cannot interfere with mere religious belief and opinions, they may with practices. … Can a man excuse his practices to the contrary because of his religious belief? To permit this would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself.”“To make an individual’s obligation to obey such a law contingent upon the law’s coincidence with his religious beliefs, except where the State’s interest is “compelling” — permitting him, by virtue of his beliefs, “to become a law unto himself,” Reynolds v. United States, 98 U.S. at 167 — contradicts both constitutional tradition and common sense.”

And when anti-discrimination laws protect people on the basis of religion you never hear bigots like bad anonymous saying they shouldn't because religious belief is not a physical characteristic - they're all just hypocrites

Bad anonymous said "good news: homosexuals are banned from marching in the St Patrick's Day parade in NYC".

Your cheering the recent passage of Uganda's anti-gay law is conspicuous by its absence. It calls for life imprisonment for gays and multi-year imprisonment for anyone providing services to gays or not reporting gay people to the authorities.

In the past you've advocated increased state punishments every time a gay person has sex and condoned Iran executing people for gayness. What happened? Are you trying to hide your true desires again?

I see it now, I don't always read all the comments. You said "Uganda is fed up with homosexual behavior and is dropping its lenient policies"

I see you haven't changed much, you consider long prison terms for gayness to be lenient and life in prison to be just right.

Bad anonymous said "I don't really cheer such things".

You most certainly do. Calling imprisonment for gayness "lenient" can't be characterized as anything other than cheering on the criminilization of harmless gay relationships. That's why you made that post, to cheer on the abuse of innocent gays and lesbians. Just like when you said "In the United States you can be executed for trivial reasons,in Iran you have to do something serious like engaging in gay sex to be executed."

Bad anonymous said "but, from what I hear, homosexuality is out of control in Uganada, so you can understand the public backlash".

As you're well aware, gayness exists to the same extent in every society at every point in history - its a minority thing,there is no such thing as it "being out of control". You're just trying to justify the insane abuse of innocent people in Uganda that you'd like to see happen in the U.S. and around the world. The so called "backlash" in Uganda was created by American christian bigots who travelled there and promoted hatred and violence with lies about gays all being child molesters, gayness being a choice and all gays are recruited, gays causing the holocaust, and Rwandan genocide. American bigots know they've lost their war in the United states so they're spreading their hatred and violence where ignorance abounds and people still fall for outrageous lies. People like you are less and less welcome in the United States, you should consider packing your bags and moving to Uganda where your bigotry is still welcomed.

Bad anonymous said "hint: don't try to force people to bake cakes used for a celebration of sexual deviance".

Gayness is a normal,natural,and healthy variant for a minority of the population - it is no more deviant than left-handedness.

And no one has ever been forced to bake a cake or provide any other services to gay couples. If people don't want to abide by the regulations required to operate a business no one will force them to stay in that job and "violate" their "sincerely held" beliefs.

And in case anyone missed it bad anonymous is trying to threaten American gays with a backlash that will result in life imprisonment if any gay couple asks a bigot to bake them a cake.

Being asked to bake a cake for a gay wedding, that's what bad anonymous means by gayness being "out of control".

They're not scared of your idle threats bad anonymous. The |American public is accepting gayness at a faster rate than laws are changing to accomodate gay equality. You bigots are in an ever shrinking minority. These unconstitutional laws trying to allow discrimination for religious "beliefs" ARE the backlash from you bigots. They're a hail mary attempt to carve out an exemption for bigots that see they can't stop their world from changing. This is your last gasp and you'll die out with a whimper, not a roar.

As bigots like bad anonymous try to justify discrimination by twisting themselves into rhetorical pretzels and logical fallacies the rest of the United States is moving on:

This afternoon a federal judge in Texas ruled the states ban on gay marriage is unconstitutional. It marks the seventh time a judge has ruled a ban on gay marriage is unconstitutional since the supreme court overturned the ironically named "Defense" of Marriage Act last summer.

Next month the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Chage releases the final version of its assessment. Previewing the findings the group's co-chair said "Thbeim,pacts of climate change that have already occurred are very evident, they're widespread, they have consequences. I think if you look around the world at the damages that hve been sustained in a wide range of climate related events, its very clear we're not prepared for the kinds of event[s] we're already seeing.

While bad anonymous tries to pretend the 2% of the earths surface the United States represents is the whole story on climate change in the first two months of 2014 have seen some of the most extreme weather in recent years. Southern California is finally expected to see some rainfall today after two years of all time record drought. In Britain a series of floods brought the wettest winter in 250 years. While climate change deniers point to frigid cold temperatures in parts of the U.S. as evidence that the earth isn't getting warmer in other parts of the world the heat is extreme.

The southern hemisphere had the warmest start to a year ever recorded. Temperatures in Melbourne rose to over 100 degrees for over four consecutive days. This months winter olympics in Sochi were officially the warmest winter olympic games ever. And parts of Russia and the Arctic have been a full 50 degrees warmer than usual.

Climate change isn't just real, its happening and the sooner we move past pseudo-scientific debates about the veractiy of things that are established fact based on data and measurement the sooner we can actually do something about it.

""Gov. Jan Brewer avoided going down in history as 'Jan Crow' by wisely vetoing this wolf in sheep's clothing," said Truth Wins Out's Executive Director Wayne Besen. "If this bill had become law, it would have been a disaster for Arizona's reputation and severely tarnished the governor's legacy"

"This was a major defeat for what has become a concerted Hail Mary campaign to carve out special rights for religious conservatives so that they don't have to play by the same rules as everyone else does," said Evan Hurst, Truth Wins Out's Associate Director. "In this new up-is-down world, anti-gay religious folks are 'practicing their faith' when they're baking cakes or renting out hotel rooms to travelers. On the ground, these bills hurt real, live LGBT people.""

"Being same sex attracted is an innate harmless characgteristic of a person."

lazy Priya is clearly a person that hides behind this "innateness" concept to avoid self-improvement and growth

for example, the lazy one, who doesn't want to invest the time and energy to learn to spell, just tells people that IQ is an innate characteristic (or should I say "characgteristic"?) and it's bigoted to expect people such as lazy Priya to learn to spell

Amid continued pessimism about the economy and direction of the country, 59 percent of Americans say they are disappointed in Mr. Obama's presidency (including 37 percent who are very disappointed.)

Disappointment with Barack Obama's presidency has grown since the summer of 2012, and much of that rise has been among independents. Forty percent of independents say they are VERY disappointed today, up from 27 percent in August 2012.

It might seem strange to say it, but I am a global warming skeptic because of Carl Sagan.

This might seem strange because Sagan was an early promoter of the theory that man-made emissions of carbon dioxide are going to fry the globe. But it’s not so strange when you consider the larger message that made Sagan famous.

As with many people my age, Sagan’s 1980 series “Cosmos,” which aired on public television when I was eleven years old, was my introduction to science, and it changed my life. “Cosmos” shared the overview of the history of science and the distinctive ethos behind the scientific method. Sagan returned again and again to one central theme: that the first rule of science is to follow the evidence wherever it leads, regardless of one’s wishes or preconceptions. He spoke eloquently about the Ancient Greek Pythagoreans and their attempt to suppress the facts about “irrational numbers” that didn’t fit their theory. And he spoke admiringly about the 17th-century astronomer Johannes Kepler, who started out pursuing a theory in which the planets move in circular orbits reflecting the ratios of the perfect Pythagorean solids—and ended up being driven by the evidence to reject this theory and discover completely new laws of planetary motion.

But this can be a difficult rule to follow. It is easy to spot the unexamined assumptions of others, but harder to root out your own prejudices. A few years ago, while watching “Cosmos” again for the first time in 25 years, I was reminded that Sagan did not always practice what he preached, and his error sheds light on the global warming theory’s original sin against science. It is a sin that has only gotten worse and which explains the scandalous state of today’s debate over global warming.

In the third episode of “Cosmos,” Sagan presents our nearest planetary neighbors, Venus and Mars, as cautionary tales of what happens when a potentially Earth-like planet goes wrong and become inhospitable to life. In his telling, Venus is a warning about how a runaway greenhouse effect can turn a planet’s surface into an acidic furnace, while Mars is a cautionary tale about how an inadequate greenhouse affect can leave a planet cold, dry, and barren. He proceeds to apply these lessons to Earth, predicting two possible doomsday scenarios: one in which deforestation causes the Earth to cool, and one in which fossil fuels cause it to warm.

"Human activities brighten our landscape and our atmosphere. Might this ultimately make an ice age here? At the same time we are releasing vast quantities of carbon dioxide, increasing the greenhouse effect…. It may not take much to destabilize the Earth’s climate, to convert this heaven, our only home in the Cosmos, into a kind of hell."

This is a bit of a cultural time capsule, preserving the precise moment at which scientific alarmists were switching from warning about a new ice age, in the 1970s, to warning about runaway warming.

To his credit, Sagan admits that the science on this subject is still in its early stages—but then he makes a disastrous error.

"And yet we ravage the Earth at an accelerated pace, as if it belonged to this one generation, as if it were ours to do with as we please…. Our generation must choose. Which do we value more: short-term profits or the long-term habitability of our planetary home?…

The study of the global climate, the sun’s influence, the comparison of the Earth with other worlds, these are subjects in their earliest stages of development. They are funded poorly and grudgingly, and meanwhile we continue to load the Earth’s atmosphere with materials about whose long-term influence we are almost entirely ignorant."

Can you see the error? Sagan enters this topic with a clear animus against the profit motive and a pre-established belief that industrial civilization is “ravaging the earth.” These are the obvious cultural biases of a late-20th-century modern liberal. So he considers two alternative theories—that we are destroying the planet by cooling it down, or we are destroying the planet by heating it up—and calls for more government funding to figure out which is correct. But his bias prevents him from seriously considering the obvious third option: that our effect on the Earth’s climate is negligible, any heating or cooling is within the normal range of natural variation, and the benefits of industrial civilization far outweigh any negative effects. But if we don’t treat this as an option, much less as an equally likely option, no government funding is likely to be devoted to pursuing that theory.

This is the original sin of the global warming theory: that it was founded in a presumption of guilt against industrial civilization. All of the billions of dollars in government research funding and the entire cultural establishment that has been built up around global warming were founded on the presumption that we already knew the conclusion—we’re “ravaging the planet”—and we’re only interested in evidence that supports that conclusion.

That brings us to where we are today. The establishment’s approach to the scientific debate over global warming is to declare that no such debate exists—and to ruthlessly stamp it out if anyone tries to start one.

That’s how we get the Los Angeles Times loftily declaring that it won’t even publish letters to the editor that question global warming. That’s how we get Michael Mann’s lawsuit attempting to make it a legally punishable offense to “question his intellect and reasoning.”

That’s how we get the appalling petition to spike Charles Krauthammer’s Washington Post‘s column for expressing mere agnosticism about global warming.

It’s how we get the New York Times casually suggesting that global warming “deniers” should be stabbed.

And then there is this doozy: at the University of Virginia, Thomas Forman II declares in the student newspaper that global warming skeptics shouldn’t even be allowed to speak on campus, because “we should keep our debates out of our science classes.”

This, at the university founded by Thomas Jefferson, who said, “here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.” He also said, “It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.”

Forman is the president of the UVA Environmental Sciences Organization, which “provides a link between the Environmental Sciences Department and the students of the University,” “mainly geared toward undergraduate majors and minors in the department.” So the guy who believes in keeping debate out of our science classes has appointed himself as a guide for every undergraduate who wants to enter the field of climate science.

This puts a whole new light on the claim that a “consensus” of climate scientists backs global warming. It’s easy to manufacture such a consensus when you decree ahead of time that no contrary opinion may be heard. When I saw the recent claim that 97% of climate scientists endorse the theory of catastrophic man-made global warming, it struck me that this is the same margin by which dictators typically claim they have won re-election—and for the same reason. These are both systems in which voting for the “wrong” result is not tolerated.

To see how fanatical this atmosphere of intolerance has become, consider the case of Bjorn Lomborg, who does not even question whether man-made global warming is occurring, but merely argues that it would cost the world far more to stop carbon dioxide emissions than it would to ameliorate the effects of global warming. For this heresy, he had his funding specifically cut off by the Danish government and has had to move into a kind of voluntary exile in Prague. A long profile of Lomborg describes how he has been ostracized merely for questioning the economic and political policies for dealing with global warming. Which is revealing in itself, because it implies that it is the political end result, the campaign to impose massive taxes and restrictions on fossil fuels, that is the fixed assumption to which science must bend.

This is why I treat scientific claims about global warming with such skepticism: I would give them a lot more credence if I thought anyone was allowed to come up with a different answer. As I observed in the Mann vs. Steyn case, if it is a sin to doubt, then there is no science.

That’s a lesson I learned from Carl Sagan, and while he had some role in launching the current global warming orthodoxy, I suspect he would be appalled at the unscientific fanaticism with which it is now enforced. Consider Sagan’s treatment of Immanuel Velikovsky, whose crackpot theories about the development of the solar system enjoyed a brief vogue in the middle of the 20th century. After dissecting the various absurdities of Velikovsky’s theory, Sagan offered this conclusion:

"The worst aspect of the Velikovsky affair is not that many of his idea were wrong or silly or in gross contradiction to the facts. Rather, the worst aspect is that some scientists attempted to suppress Velikovsky’s ideas. The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or in politics, but it is not the path to knowledge, and there is no place for it in the endeavor of science."

Let this serve as an answer—and a rebuke—to today’s global warming establishment.

We could be looking at marriage equality across the United States before Barack Obama is out of office. If so he'll be remembered for freeing the gays much as Lincoln is remembered for freeing the slaves.

you know, lazy Priya, I was thinking about your comments about religious discrimination and I think you may have a point

I should oppose these laws

when I think about it, if I were a baker and someone came in and a Muslim asked me to bake a cake that said "Allahu Akbar" or a Wiccan asked for "Worship the Goddess" or an atheist asked for "God is not great", I would decline

they can find someone who agrees with them to support their view

personally, though, I don't think any of those groups would push the issue

only homosexuals would

they love the idea that people who don't support them should be forced to

We already knew that we had reached the tipping point over the last few years, that nationwide marriage equality had become inevitable with majority support, and that Millennials were leading the way, but the Public Religion Research Institute has released an extensive report bringing all of that information into the same place, and the picture it paints is good:

Support for same-sex marriage jumped 21 percentage points from 2003, when Massachusetts became the first state to legalize same-sex marriage, to 2013. Currently, a majority (53%) of Americans favor allowing gay and lesbian couples to legally marry, compared to 41% who oppose. In 2003, less than one-third (32%) of Americans supported allowing gay and lesbian people to legally marry, compared to nearly 6-in-10 (59%) who opposed.

Today, majorities of Americans in the Northeast (60%), West (58%), and Midwest (51%) favor allowing gay and lesbians to legally marry, while Southerners are evenly divided (48% favor, 48% oppose).

In 2003, all major religious groups opposed same-sex marriage, with the exception of the religiously unaffiliated. Today, there are major religious groups on both sides of the issue. Religiously unaffiliated Americans (73%), white mainline Protestants (62%), white Catholics (58%), and Hispanic Catholics (56%) all favor allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry. A majority (83%) of Jewish Americans also favor legalizing same-sex marriage.

The fact that Southerners are now evenly divided is remarkable, and fantastic. Many LGBT people have long written off the South as the region which will have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the real world, and in many of the South’s state legislatures, that will indeed be the case. But the fact that we’re now evenly divided in the South bodes well for gays and lesbians in the region. There is still much work to be done, but the fight has become an inevitable win.

Moreover, with the Religious Right’s current fake campaign for “religious freedom,” it’s more important than ever to note that the actual numbers show that the only “religious freedom” they’re fighting for is their own. Large majorities of Mainline Protestants, white Catholics and Hispanic Catholics support marriage equality. The Jewish population has long been supportive, but the fact that a full 83% of Jewish Americans support marriage equality is a good indicator that no Religious Right commentator ever has the right to utter the made up word “Judeo-Christian” ever again. There’s not a damn thing “Judeo-” about what they’re pushing.

Bad anonymous said "I don't think any of those groups would push the issue only homosexuals would they love the idea that people who don't support them should be forced to the homosexual agenda is about imposition".

Actions speak louder than words and when you examine the actions of gays and bigoted christians you see is the bigoted christians who are about imposition. The public is obligated by anti-discrimination laws across the nation to serve christians regardless of their personal desires. Bigoted christians like you want to keep such protections for yourselves, but deny them to gays. Bigoted christians like you are all about special rights for christians and special oppression for gays and lesbians.

Gays and lesbians on the other hand don't seek to have christians excluded from anti-discrimination laws or denied the right to marry the partner of their choosing. Gays and lesbians stand up for bigoted christians like bad anonymous having the same rights they do.

Its bigoted christians who are about imposing on others, not gays and lesbians.

Bad anonymous's idea of equality is that gays can be "protected" by anti-discrimination laws but then everyone else should have the "equal" right to ignore those laws. His idea of equality is that gays aren't protected at all against discrimination, that everyone retains the right to discriminate against gays, but not christians, blacks, women, etc. and certainly not him.

That's how much he's had to twist his reality to cope with his congnitive dissonance and pretend what he advocates is equality. The world he inhabits is a fantasy where he can declare anything to be and it magically is, evidence and facts be damned.

We’re all familiar with the survey data that shows that more Americans are secular-minded (not necessarily atheist) than ever before. But Peter Foster writes in the Telegraph that the trend toward secularization may be going faster than we think and that we may be on the verge of a major shift akin to what has happened with support for same-sex marriage.

After several decades of doubt over the data, says Chaves, it is now clear beyond reasonable doubt that America is secularizing.

The United States still feels highly religious on the surface, but is it possible that attitudes to religion in the US could undergo a sudden shift – as they have, say, on gay marriage.

Right now, the shift in attitudes to religion is, according to the famous “nones” Pew survey, driven by so-called “generational replacement” – ie the younger generation slowly becoming less religious and their attitudes filtering into society and the polling data, as their parents and grandparents die off.

If that trend continues, then change will be very slow. But there is another scenario, which is when a shift in attitudes leaps across generations, as happened with gay marriage, precipitating a much sharper change which has seen those in favour of gay marriage leap from 33% a decade ago to 55-57 per cent today.

Analysis of European secularisation might provide us some pointers for the US going foward. There, according to analysis by David Voas, a sociologist at Essex University, it is clear that the rise of so-called “fuzzy fidelity” – ie those with no explicit religious affliation, but who still believe in some kind of higher power and go to church on Christmas – has proved to be a “staging post on the road from religious to secular hegemony”.

“Indifference,” Voas writes in his 2008 paper The Rise and Fall of Fuzzy Fidelity in Europe, “is ultimately as damaging for religion as scepticism.”

If that’s the case in the US, then the belief among many Evangelicals that the “nones” are still fundamentally religious may prove to be wishful thinking.

I have long believed that a sizable percentage of churchgoers are there for reasons that have little to do with their actual religious belief. They are there because it’s what they know, what is expected of them, because it’s their primary social set and they define themselves as members of that tribe. But the actual beliefs have little influence over their lives, to the extent that they think about them at all. Richard Dawkins refers to these people as “functional atheists”.

Bad anonymous said "you know, lazy Priya, I was thinking about your comments about religious discrimination and I think you may have a point I should oppose these laws."

It took you over ten years to accept that you were being hypocritical by insisting gays be excluded from anti-discrimination laws but not Christians. That just shows how deeply ingrained your bias is.

But you don't make that statement now out of any sincere belief in equality, you do it to deflect the truth that you're still just as in favour of inequality as ever. You know 80% of Americans are christians so there is virtually no chance any American business is going to want to discriminate against christians but plenty of them will want to discriminate against gays.

This way you can pretend to be supportive of equality under the law when the truth is you're okay with people discriminating against gays but you're not okay with people discriminating against christians. You know that with both christians and gays excluded from American anti-discrimination laws it'll only be the gays who are discriminated against and that's always been your goal and still is - regardless of your sudden disingenous claim to oppose anyone being protected by anti-discrimination laws.

Thanks for yet another right wing opinion piece, "The Original Sin of Global Warming", written by Robert Tracinski, who is a senior writer at The Federalist. He studied philosophy at the University of Chicago and for more than 20 years has written about politics, markets, and foreign policy. He has been published in dozens of newspapers, from the Chicago Tribune to the San Francisco Chronicle, and been featured on many radio and television shows, from Rush Limbaugh to “The O’Reilly Factor.”

Wow, from Limbaugh to O'Reilly huh? That's not much of a range!

I see your opinion piece and raise you these scientific facts and theories from actual scientist who study climate, not philosophy.

"Warm weather thousands of miles away would seem an unlikely cause of the United Kingdom’s freakishly wet winter or the bone-deep chill experienced this year by the eastern United States. But a warming Arctic can be blamed for both, said Rutgers University atmospheric scientist Jennifer Francis at the recent AAAS Annual Meeting in Chicago, Illinois.

“It’s because the pattern this winter has been basically stuck in once place ever since early December,” Francis said. And the pattern—which has included cold, cold temperatures in the eastern United States, for instance—has been stuck because of the Arctic.

Back in 1896, the Swedish physicist Svante Arrhenius first calculated [pdf] how pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere would warm the planet through the greenhouse effect. That warming, he wrote, would be most pronounced in the Arctic regions, a phenomenon known as Arctic (or polar) amplification. And it is now able to be seen above the noise of the world’s weather—below is a NASA animation of temperature differences compared to averages, from 1950 through 2013:

The recent amp up of Arctic warming is readily seen by the loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic Ocean. The extent of summer sea ice, in particular, has been on the decline for more than two decades, and the loss of old, thick ice has been especially pronounced (see video).

“When you’re losing the sea ice, Arctic amplification is certainly here,” said Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center. Losing that sea ice, he said, will have impacts in the mid-latitudes, particularly on weather patterns.

The Arctic affects the rest of the planet in many ways, but the one that’s most relevant for Francis’ work is called the poleward temperature gradient—that’s the difference in temperature between the Arctic and the mid-latitudes, where the continental United States sits. That poleward temperature gradient causes air to start flowing from the North Pole southward, and a spinning Earth forces the air to move from west to east, creating the jet stream.

Frequent fliers will recognize the jet stream as the river of air that can give their airplane a boost when flying from Los Angeles to New York City. Weather fanatics, though, might be more familiar with the air pattern for its ability to move weather systems across the continent.

“When you warm the Arctic more rapidly, you’re decreasing the difference in temperature between the Arctic and the areas farther south,” and that’s weakening the poleward temperature gradient, Francis explained. A weaker gradient makes for a weaker jet stream...."

"...“As we weaken this difference in temperature between the Arctic and the mid-latitudes, we expect those winds from west to east to get weaker,” Francis said. “When that happens, we also expect to see that flow in the upper-level jet stream to become more wavy.” Francis compared the jet stream to a river. When a river flows down a steep mountainside, it flows quickly and its path is straight. But when the river flows over a flat plain, it’s slower and its path can begin to wander. The jet stream now sometimes meanders like that slow-moving river.

A weaker jet stream is probably more easily deflected off its path when it encounters something like a mountain range or a mass of hot air, Francis said. Those large waves increase the likelihood that a weather system—such as a particularly cold winter or a period without rain—gets blocked. “This means that the weather they create is lasting longer in your location. This leads to the more persistent weather patterns and the tendency of extreme weather of certain types to become more likely,” Francis said. “This is the hypothesis.”

And that’s the big caveat in this work—this is a hypothesis developed within the last few years by Francis and her colleague, Steve Vavrus, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “Not everyone is on board,” Francis admitted.

But this appears to be a fairly new development in the evolution of the planet’s climate. The signal of Arctic amplification, first predicted back in 1896, really only became noticeable above the random ups and downs of the weather within the last 10 or 15 years, so its effects—such as the weakened jet stream—are just now starting to be experienced, Francis said.

And Francis admits that having weather pattern stuck in place by the jet stream doesn’t explain all of the recent bouts of extreme weather. It will take scientists some time to figure it all out, but Francis noted that this hypothesis is backed up by a combination of observations, physics and climate models.

“There’s a lot going on in the climate system that affects the jet stream,” she said, “and figuring out how the different pieces of the puzzle fit together is a really active area of research right now.”"

Good anonymous said "Thanks for yet another right wing opinion piece, "The Original Sin of Global Warming", written by Robert Tracinski, who is a senior writer at The Federalist. He studied philosophy at the University of Chicago and for more than 20 years has written about politics, markets, and foreign policy".

Who are the global warming denier?

Widely known as climate change "skeptics" or "deniers", these individuals are generally not climate scientists and do not debate the science with the climate scientists directly—for example, by publishing in peer-reviewed scientific journals, or participating in international conferences on climate science. Instead, they focus their attention on the media, the general public and policy-makers with the goal of delaying action on climate change.

Not surprisingly, the deniers have received significant funding from coal and oil companies, including ExxonMobil. They also have well-documented connections with public relations firms that have set up industry-funded lobby groups to, in the words of one leaked memo, "reposition global warming as theory (not fact)."

After 15 years of increasingly definitive scientific studies attesting to the reality and significance of global climate change, the deniers' tactics have shifted. Many deniers no longer deny that climate change is happening, but instead argue that the cost of taking action is too high—or even worse, that it is too late to take action. All of these arguments are false and are rejected by the scientific community at large.

To gain an understanding of the level of scientific consensus on climate change, one study examined every article on climate change published in peer-reviewed scientific journals over a 10-year period. Of the 928 articles on climate change the authors found, not one of them disagreed with the consensus position that climate change is happening and is human-induced.

These findings contrast dramatically with the popular media's reporting on climate change. One study analyzed coverage of climate change in four influential American newspapers (New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times and Wall Street Journal) over a 14-year period. It found that more than half of the articles discussing climate change gave equal weight to the scientifically discredited views of the deniers.

This discrepancy is largely due to the media's drive for "balance" in reporting. Journalists are trained to identify one position on any issue, and then seek out a conflicting position, providing both sides with roughly equal attention. Unfortunately, this "balance" does not always correspond with the actual prevalence of each view within society, and can result in unintended bias. This has been the case with reporting on climate change, and as a result, many people believe that the reality of climate change is still being debated by scientists when it is not.

Global warming alarmists are howling in outrage as Charles Krauthammer followed up a surgical takedown of global warming alarmism in his Washington Post column last Thursday with a similarly brilliant appearance on The O’Reilly Factor last night. For all the alarmists’ collective outrage, they have yet to identify a single error in what Krauthammer wrote and said. In the process, they have perfectly illustrated the difference between global warming skepticism, which relies on scientific evidence, and global warming alarmism, which relies on name-calling and temper tantrums.

Krauthammer began his Washington Post column by expressing concern about human carbon dioxide emissions. He followed that up by pointing out the virtues of critical inquiry and the Scientific Method. In particular, he pointed out several global warming subtopics in which alarmists have been wrong on the facts. Krauthammer documented how hurricanes have become less frequent and severe, how tornadoes have similarly moderated, how climate models show global warming should increase rather than decrease California rainfall, and how alarmist computer models consistently predict far more warming than occurs in the real world.

Concluding his article, Krauthammer noted how global warming alarmists typically respond to such evidence and factual data by attempting to silence scientific dissent through bullying tactics rather than scientific debate.

As if intentionally attempting to prove Krauthammer correct, global warming alarmists have responded to Krauthammer’s column and O’Reilly appearance with shrill outrage, bullying tactics, and not a single shred of scientific data to contradict Krauthammer’s long list of scientific arguments. In a response that perfectly summed up the alarmist response. Time magazine senior editor Jeffrey Kluger repeatedly called Krauthammer an “unfrozen caveman,” failed to present any scientific data to contradict Krauthammer’s, and concluded by appealing to an abstract notion of “settled science.”

This leads one to wonder when the science became “settled.” Was it seven years ago when alarmists claimed global warming would reduce the frequency and severity of Arctic cold fronts reaching the United States, or this winter when they blame an increase in such repeated Arctic cold fronts on global warming? Was it three weeks ago when Time claimed global warming is bringing an end to snowfall, or two weeks ago when every state but Florida had snow on the ground and alarmists blamed it on global warming? Was it in 2007 when alarmists claimed global warming was melting Antarctic ice sheets, or in 2013 when they said global warming is causing record Antarctic ice extent? Was it in 1998 when alarmist computer models predicted dramatic warming during the following 16 years, or today after no such warming has occurred?

When Charles Krauthammer and others ask such questions, one would expect global warming advocates who feel secure in their supporting scientific evidence to present the evidence and let the science do the talking. When prominent global warming advocates such as Barack Obama, John Kerry, and Jeffrey Kluger respond instead by engaging in juvenile name-calling – “flat earthers,” “unfrozen caveman” – this tells us where the science really stands. It’s like watching a spoiled three-year-old respond to his parents’ logical admonition to not eat sugar all day by flailing himself on the floor and throwing a three-hour temper tantrum. It may make for good theatrics, but it hardly addresses the sound science behind his parents’ admonition.

Year after year, I have invited many of the most prominent advocates of a global warming crisis to make their scientific case at the Heartland Institute’s International Conference on Climate Change. Year after year, the alarmists shy away from the science and resort instead to the sort of long-distance name-calling that Time magazine launched against Charles Krauthammer. Their name-calling temper tantrums may help them vent their anger and rage at being proven wrong by the science, but it doesn’t change the fact that they are continually proven wrong by the science.

I repeat: I’m not a global warming believer. I’m not a global warming denier. I’ve long believed that it cannot be good for humanity to be spewing tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. I also believe that those scientists who pretend to know exactly what this will cause in 20, 30 or 50 years are white-coated propagandists.

“The debate is settled,” asserted propagandist in chief Barack Obama in his latest State of the Union address. “Climate change is a fact.” Really? There is nothing more anti-scientific than the very idea that science is settled, static, impervious to challenge. Take a non-climate example. It was long assumed that mammograms help reduce breast cancer deaths. This fact was so settled that Obamacare requires every insurance plan to offer mammograms (for free, no less) or be subject to termination.

Now we learn from a massive randomized study — 90,000 women followed for 25 years — that mammograms may have no effect on breast cancer deaths. Indeed, one out of five of those diagnosed by mammogram receives unnecessary radiation, chemo or surgery.

So much for settledness. And climate is less well understood than breast cancer. If climate science is settled, why do its predictions keep changing? And how is it that the great physicist Freeman Dyson, who did some climate research in the late 1970s, thinks today’s climate-change Cassandras are hopelessly mistaken?

They deal with the fluid dynamics of the atmosphere and oceans, argues Dyson, ignoring the effect of biology, i.e., vegetation and topsoil. Further, their predictions rest on models they fall in love with: “You sit in front of a computer screen for 10 years and you start to think of your model as being real.” Not surprisingly, these models have been “consistently and spectacularly wrong” in their predictions, write atmospheric scientists Richard McNider and John Christy — and always, amazingly, in the same direction.

Settled? Even Britain’s national weather service concedes there’s been no change — delicately called a “pause” — in global temperature in 15 years. If even the raw data is recalcitrant, let alone the assumptions and underlying models, how settled is the science?

But even worse than the pretense of settledness is the cynical attribution of any politically convenient natural disaster to climate change, a clever term that allows you to attribute anything — warming and cooling, drought and flood — to man’s sinful carbon burning.

Accordingly, Obama ostentatiously visited drought-stricken California last Friday. Surprise! He blamed climate change. Here even the New York Times gagged, pointing out that far from being supported by the evidence, “the most recent computer projections suggest that as the world warms, California should get wetter, not drier, in the winter.”

How inconvenient. But we’ve been here before. Hurricane Sandy was made the poster child for the alleged increased frequency and strength of “extreme weather events” like hurricanes.

Nonsense. Sandy wasn’t even a hurricane when it hit the United States. Indeed, in all of 2012, only a single hurricane made U.S. landfall . And 2013 saw the fewest Atlantic hurricanes in 30 years. In fact, in the last half-century, one-third fewer major hurricanes have hit the United States than in the previous half-century.

Similarly tornadoes. Every time one hits, the climate-change commentary begins. Yet last year saw the fewest in a quarter-century. And the last 30 years — of presumed global warming — has seen a 30 percent decrease in extreme tornado activity (F3 and above) versus the previous 30 years.

None of this is dispositive. It doesn’t settle the issue. But that’s the point. It mocks the very notion of settled science, which is nothing but a crude attempt to silence critics and delegitimize debate. As does the term “denier” — an echo of Holocaust denial, contemptibly suggesting the malevolent rejection of an established historical truth.

Climate-change proponents have made their cause a matter of fealty and faith. For folks who pretend to be brave carriers of the scientific ethic, there’s more than a tinge of religion in their jeremiads. If you whore after other gods, the Bible tells us, “the Lord’s wrath be kindled against you, and he shut up the heaven, that there be no rain, and that the land yield not her fruit” (Deuteronomy 11).

Sounds like California. Except that today there’s a new god, the Earth Mother. And a new set of sins — burning coal and driving a fully equipped F-150.

But whoring is whoring, and the gods must be appeased. So if California burns, you send your high priest (in carbon -belching Air Force One, but never mind) to the bone-dry land to offer up, on behalf of the repentant congregation, a $1 billion burnt offering called a “climate resilience fund.”

Charles Krauthammer has degrees in political science, economics and psychiatry, not climate or environmental sciences.

And "his commentary is a veritable laundry list of shopworn talking points," prominent climate scientist, Michael Mann writes over at LiveScience, "so predictable now in climate change denialist lore that one can make a drinking game out of it." What makes this great is that's exactly what Mann proceeds to do (emphases his):

"His cry that it is "anti-scientific" to declare climate change a "fact?" A swig of vodka to start things out. [The U.S. National Academy of Sciences has concluded that "Climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for — and in many cases is already affecting — a broad range of human and natural systems."]

Trotting out a solitary maverick scientist willing to defy the conventional scientific wisdom? A chaser of beer. [The physicist Freeman Dyson has impressive credentials in physics, but he is clearly beyond his depth in his forays into climate change. And despite Krauthammer's implications to the contrary, Dyson does not deny that humans are warming the planet and changing the climate.]

Quoting University of Alabama Huntsville scientist John Christy on climate models being "consistently and spectacularly wrong?" A double-swig of scotch for this one. [Christy recently co-authored a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed where he argued that temperatures haven't warmed as much as climate models predicted, based on an extremely misleading and inappropriate comparison of models and observations. Adding to the irony is the fact that Christy is largely known for a satellite temperature estimate that was once used to argue that the globe wasn't warming. When other scientists finally got ahold of his data and reverse-engineered his calculations, they determined this to be an artifact of errors in his algorithm in algebra and sign (i.e. a "-" sign in his calculations where there should have be a "+" sign).]

The game goes on -- you, depending on your level of tolerance for alcohol and outright climate trolling, may not be able to.

"Concluding his article, Krauthammer noted how global warming alarmists typically respond to such evidence and factual data by attempting to silence scientific dissent through bullying tactics rather than scientific debate."

Krauthammer is not a climate scientist and far from wanting a scientific debate he does not seek to debate the science with the climate scientists directly by publishing in peer-reviewed scientific journals, or participating in international conferences on climate science. Instead he publishes his specious arguments in the media in an attempt to con the general public while hiding from scientific scrutiny in scientific forums.

Bad anonymous said "Settled? Even Britain’s national weather service concedes there’s been no change — delicately called a “pause” — in global temperature in 15 years. If even the raw data is recalcitrant, let alone the assumptions and underlying models, how settled is the science?".

You've repeatedly lied about what the climate science experts have said so any claim by you in this area can't be taken seriously.

While its true that the rate of atmospheric temperature increases have slowed over the last 15 years, the overall warming of the entire climate system has continued rapidly over the past 15 years, even faster than the 15 years before that. If you look at this study you can see that while the rate of temperature increase in the atmosphere has slowed, the atmospheric heating represents only 2% of the overall warming of the global climate. The rates of temperature increase for the remaining portions of the global climate such as upper and deep ocean temperatures, and land and ice temperatures have increased at a far greater rate.

The issue of weather global warming is happening is most certainly settled, the data far from being "recalcitrant" prove that beyond a doubt. Scientists are virtually unanimous that global warming is happening and is man made. The only controversy about this exists in imagination of uninformed laypeople feigning scientific debate in the media while scrupulously avoiding real scientific forums where they'd present contradictory evidence if they had any.

“After careful consideration, and applying the law as it must, this Court holds that Texas’ prohibition on same-sex marriage conflicts with the United States Constitution’s guarantees of equal protection and due process. Texas’ current marriage laws deny homosexual couples the right to marry, and in doing so, demean their dignity for no legitimate reason. Accordingly, the Court finds these laws are unconstitutional and hereby grants a preliminary injunction enjoining Defendants from enforcing Texas’ ban on same-sex marriage,” United States District Judge Orlando L. Garcia said in a Feb. 26 ruling.

Kentucky

“In the end, the Court concludes that Kentucky’s denial of recognition for valid same-sex marriages violates the United States Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the law, even under the most deferential standard of review. Accordingly, Kentucky’s statutes and constitutional amendment that mandate this denial are unconstitutional,” U.S. District Judge John G. Heyburn II said in a Feb. 12 ruling. The Kentucky ruling was limited in that the judge only found the state must recognize out-of-state same-sex marriages.

Virginia

“The court is compelled to conclude that Virginia’s Marriage Laws unconstitutionally deny Virginia’s gay and lesbian citizens the fundamental freedom to choose to marry. Government interests in perpetuating traditions, shielding state matters from federal interference, and favoring one model of parenting over others must yield to this country’s cherished protections that ensure the exercise of the private choices of the individual citizen regarding love and family,” U.S. District Judge Arenda Wright Allen said in a Feb. 13 ruling.

Oklahoma

“Equal protection is at the very heart of our legal system and central to our consent to be governed. It is not a scarce commodity to be meted out begrudgingly or in short portions. Therefore, the majority view in Oklahoma must give way to individual constitutional rights,” U.S. District Judge Terence Kern wrote in his decision filed on Jan. 14.

Utah

“The court hereby declares that Amendment 3 is unconstitutional because it denies the Plaintiffs their rights to due process and equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution,” Judge Robert J. Shelby, of the United States District Court for the District of Utah, wrote in his opinion filed on Dec. 20.

Ohio

The Ohio ruling is narrower and focuses on whether the state has the right to not recognize out-of-state same-sex marriages. It does not, U.S. District Judge Timothy S. Black ruled.

“The Court’s ruling today is a limited one, and states simply, that under the Constitution of the United States, Ohio must recognize valid out-of-state marriages between same-sex couples on Ohio death certificates, just as Ohio recognizes all other out-of-state marriages,” he wrote in a Dec. 23 ruling. “… Ohio law, as applied to these Plaintiffs, violates the United States Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection: that ‘No State shall make or enforce any law which shall . . . deny to any person within its jurisdiction equal protection of the laws.’”

"WASHINGTON — The federal budget deficit fell precipitously to $680 billion in the 2013 fiscal year from about $1.1 trillion the year before, the Treasury Department said Thursday. That is the smallest deficit since 2008, and marks the end of a five-year stretch when the country’s fiscal gap came in at more than a trillion dollars a year.

The report comes days before the White House is expected to release a new budget. Democrats have said that the still-tepid recovery requires government investment along with commitments to reduce deficits in the long term — while also emphasizing the rapidly falling budget gap.

Republicans have long said that Democrats have proven poor stewards of the economy, overseeing a period of sluggish growth and rising debt.

The report, which was a regular update on the country’s finances, underscores the persistence, if not the strength, of the recovery after the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Growth in tax revenue accounts for much of the decline in the deficit. But increases in taxes and cuts in federal spending figure strongly too, as does a surprising — and surprisingly long — slowdown in the pace of health-spending growth.

The Treasury said that revenue climbed $324 billion to $2.8 trillion between 2012 and 2013. That is growth of around 12.9 percent, reflecting both higher income rates, including higher top marginal rates and the expiration of the payroll tax holiday, and a strengthening economy.

At the same time, government spending grew relatively slowly, to $3.9 trillion from $3.8 trillion a year earlier, the Treasury said.

“Thanks to the tenacity of the American people and the determination of the private sector we are moving in the right direction,” said Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew in the report. “The United States has recovered faster than any other advanced economy, and our deficit today is less than half of what it was when President Obama first took office.” "

after ranting about the dangers of global warming for years, the Obama administration is now blaming the end of global warming for the poor performance of the economy under Obama:

"Unusually harsh winter weather appears to be behind recent signs of weakness in the U.S. economy, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen said on Thursday.

Testifying to the Senate Banking Committee, Yellen said the Fed would watch carefully to ensure weather was indeed the culprit.

Heavy snowstorms and cold snaps have hit U.S. employment, retail sales and manufacturing. The world's largest economy added fewer than 200,000 jobs combined in December and January, well below expectations. Some investors think the Fed could alter its plans if a report on February hiring next week shows similar weakness.

"It's really quite a range of data that has been soft recently. I think it's clear that ... unseasonably cold weather has played a role in much of that," Yellen, the Fed's former vice chair who took the reins on February 1, told lawmakers."

California frequently has severe droughts that last for years and then end suddenly

looks like history's repeating itself:

"A storm brought some of the highest rainfall totals to the Los Angeles area in years, including eight inches on some mountains, and that was just the beginning.

The storm was expected to remain strong Saturday, making serious inroads against the drought.

Thunder echoed and hard rain fell late Friday night on Hollywood, which was abuzz with preparations for Sunday evening's Academy Awards and hopes the rain will have moved on by then as expected.

Rainfall totals in parts of California were impressive, especially in areas that typically don't receive much.

Three inches fell on Bel Air and Pasadena, and an urban flash-flood warning that was sent to cell phones was called late Friday night for central Los Angeles County.

For the first time in nearly three years, downtown Los Angeles received more than 2 inches - doubling its total for the rainy season that began in July, the National Weather Service said.

Meanwhile to the east in San Bernardino County, a levee failed and put eight houses in danger of flooding, but county fire crews were working to protect them and no evacuations were ordered.

Forecasters expected the storm to last through Saturday in California before trundling east into similarly rain-starved neighboring states. Phoenix was expecting its first noticeable precipitation in two months. The storm was projected to head east across the Rockies before petering out in the Northeast in several days.

Rain also fell along the central coast, the San Francisco Bay area and Central Valley.

Winter storm warnings were in effect in the Sierra Nevada. About 15 inches of new snow had fallen by mid-day Friday at the University of California, Berkeley's Central Sierra Snow Lab located at 6,900 feet elevation.

A tornado warning was issued for Sacramento, Yolo and Sutter Counties Friday night but was canceled soon after.

Farmer Ray Gene Veldhuis, who grows almonds, walnuts and pistachios and runs a 2,300-cow dairy in the Central Valley's Merced County, welcomed the wet weather.

"Hopefully, they keep coming," Veldhuis said of the storms.

Numerous traffic accidents occurred on slick roads across California, including one about 60 miles east of Los Angeles involving a big rig whose driver died after falling from a freeway overpass.

Power outages hit about 32,000 customers, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and Southern California Edison said.

The storm was good news for other Californians.

Kite-surfer Chris Strong braved pelting rain to take advantage of strong winds that gave him about an hour of fun over the pounding surf in Huntington Beach.

"I don't get to kite here in these conditions very often - only a handful of times - but you put them in the memory bank," he said."

"A storm that brought some of the highest rainfall totals to the Los Angeles area in years, including eight inches on some mountains, was just the beginning of what the region needs to pull out of a major drought.

Although the storm was expected to remain strong Saturday, forecasters said such systems would have to become common for the state to make serious inroads against the drought.

"We need several large storms and we just don't see that on the horizon," National Weather Service meteorologist Eric Boldt said Friday. "This is a rogue storm. We will dry out next week.""

Nice cutting, pasting, and changing words around to lie yet again.

Even your morning paper, the WaPo got the facts you insist on lying about right:

"AZUSA, Calif. — A storm that brought some of the highest rainfall totals to the Los Angeles area in years, including eight inches on some mountains, was just the beginning of what the region needs to pull out of a major drought.

Although the storm was expected to remain strong Saturday, forecasters said such systems would have to become common for the state to make serious inroads against the drought.

“We need several large storms and we just don’t see that on the horizon,” National Weather Service meteorologist Eric Boldt said Friday. “This is a rogue storm. We will dry out next week.”

Bad anonymous said "whether it's a "serious in-road" is a value judgement, used in this case for propaganda".

Stop the bullsh*t. It is well established how much water the human population needs as well as crops and natural vegetation. There is no debating about how much water is needed to undo the drought, it is a specific quantity and it isn't a matter of opinion.

California is in the worst drought its ever had and of course each time there's been a drought in the last 30 or 40 years its been the worst one ever because the are getting progressively worse.

Bad anonymous obviously can no longer cope with the truth and is becoming a pathological liar. The world he inhabits is a fantasy where he can declare anything to be and it magically is, evidence and facts be damned. He has given up all pretense of being honest and is detaching himself further and further from reality.

I know this is a concept foreign to you, lazy Priya, but I read widely beyond those who agree with me and so I have to decide which of their statements to repeat and which not

I know you don't have the problem because you only read those who reinforce your bias and simply cut and paste wholesale

c'est la vie

"Stop the bullsh*t"

more bad spelling

the letter you're looking for is "I"

"It is well established how much water the human population needs as well as crops and natural vegetation. There is no debating about how much water is needed to undo the drought, it is a specific quantity and it isn't a matter of opinion."

well, to begin with, I never said this was an unknown

I said it's a matter of opinion whether this is a significant start to restoring the water supply

but, actually, the amount of water is not specifically known

I used to live in Southern California and if you'd ever been there you'd know that water waste is rampant

the vegetation is artificial and fed by an enormous aqueduct system

if you leave a vacant lot alone there, it turns to desert

further, huge swaths of neighborhoods have private pools behind every house

and, why?

it's never very hot, most people artificially heat their pools

"California is in the worst drought its ever had and of course each time there's been a drought in the last 30 or 40 years its been the worst one ever because the are getting progressively worse."

oh, this may be the worst they've had but the progression hasn't been steady

nice try at a lie, though

"Bad anonymous obviously can no longer cope with the truth and is becoming a pathological liar. The world he inhabits is a fantasy where he can declare anything to be and it magically is, evidence and facts be damned. He has given up all pretense of being honest and is detaching himself further and further from reality."

nice you could jolly yourself up with a little demagoguery but, right now, alarmists are getting desperate and are seeking to shut down the speech of those who disagree with them

if they're so confident in their dubious facts and predictions, why are they doing that?

Way to go bad anonymous, twisting yourself into rhetorical pretzels and logical fallacies in order to obfuscate the truth.

You keep lying about scientists trying to shutdown speech when its media like Fox news that doesn't invite scientists on their shows to debate deniers like Krauthammer, they just present his lies opposition. And liers like Krauthammer don't debate in scientific forums like peer-reviewed scientific journals or international conferences on climate science. Instead, they focus their attention on the media where Fox gives them an unopposed Forum to disseminate lies and then when its pointed out they're lying they whine about their speech being "shut down" when its them doing the shutting down of speech.

In most cases scientists aren't allowed to talk directly to media and even if they could and wanted to they don't have the time to go on every right wing media bullsh*t program and present real science because they're busy, you know, doing real science in peer reviewed scientific journals and at climate conferences.

Your lying just keeps getting more and more extreme. Like the immoral creep you are when you read something you don't like you just announce without evidence of your own or looking at the source data that its left-wing propaganda and change it to contradict the evidence, facts, and data it was based upon. You couldn't be more unscrupulous.

Bad anonymous doesn't have any examples of scientists trying to shut down the speech of climate change deniers, its just another standard lie of his to try to create the false impression that the climate science isn't clear cut.

Its the climate deniers in the right wing media who won't give an opportunity to experts for rebuttal in their TV, radio, and print media shows. Its the climate deniers who avoid debate in scientific forums because the don't have any scientific evidence to back up their claims and they know they'd be intellectually ripped to shreds if they tried to pass of the bullsh*t they spout in the media in scientific forums.

"Reuters) - The most glamorous of all runways, the 500-foot-long Oscars red carpet, might be a fashion disaster on Sunday.

A heavy rain storm on Friday in Southern California has soaked parts of the red carpet laid down on Hollywood Boulevard, where movie stars and Tinseltown powerbrokers will make their grand entrance to the Academy Awards, film's highest honors.

Dozens of workers spent the morning securing the red carpet from the pelting rain and overflowing street gutters 48 hours before hundreds of attendees will parade designer gowns, extravagant jewels and tailored tuxedos.

Workers cleared pools of water that had collected atop the tent built to shield stars from the rain while others hustled to plug any leaks and a team wielding squeegees pushed standing water out of the protective plastic over the red carpet.

"It has been a challenge, a lot of water in a short amount of time," said Joe Lewis, the associate producer of arrivals for Hollywood's biggest night. "There is no perfect science to a rain plan. It is going to rain, there is going to be water, we have got to protect as best we can."

The rain began in Los Angeles on Thursday evening and according to the National Weather Service is not expected to let up until Sunday morning, hours before Hollywood's movie stars begin their walk across the red carpet at 3 p.m. PST (2300 GMT)."

Yes I have noticed the same thing.2013 taxes are WAY UP.they took away ALL of our personal deductions, ALL of them.

so, we are making so much money that we don't have to cover food and basic necessities for our dependents, or they have just flat out said, YEP you can pay for YOURSELVES on that base income PLUS everyone else.

At least the first basic amount of income used to be a given for everyone, it was only the higher amounts that they hit.....

it is crazy, it really makes you wonder why you bother trying anymore, or why you should raise your children with a work ethic when essentially they are going to tax away their income and give it to folks who sit on their butts, like Priya.

I really would quit, if I didn't think I would be bored to death.

but we all should, en masse, all the type A's ... you know, the 40% that pays 104% of the tax bill, just sell it all, go buy farm land in Kentucky, become farmers again, and watch it all come crashing down from the safety of our bunkers.

because I am so angry at the constant demonization for having worked my entire life .... and NEVER, NOT ONCE been on public assistance and at the same time I am chastised for being the one providing for those folks that don't bother to work (or who find work too demoralizing... I just can't do it... as if the rest of us enjoy it all the time)...

I would like to say I feel sorry for folks like that when that public assistance check disappears....

but I won't. Not one little bit.

I went on a walk with a school teacher friend of mine who voted for Obama in 2008. you know what she said ?

"I am sorry, but work or starve ! I am tired of providing for folks that don't bother to try"

"Maryland Senate passed the Fairness for All Marylanders Act (FAMA) by a vote of 32-15. This historic vote moves Maryland one step closer to providing anti-discrimination protections to transgender persons in areas of employment, housing, credit, and public accommodations. When passed by the House of Delegates and signed by Governor Martin O’Malley, Maryland would become the 18th state in the nation – plus Washington, D.C. – to prohibit discrimination based upon gender identity.

The Senate’s passage of the FAMA today sends a reaffirming message that prejudice and discrimination will no longer be tolerated. While anti-discrimination laws already exist in Maryland on the basis of race, sex, religion, national origin, ancestry, disability, age and sexual orientation, no such protections exist for individuals on the basis of gender identity. Thanks to the hard work and input of our broad coalition of supporters, Maryland is now one step closer to expanding these important anti-discrimination protections to include the transgender community."

Ellen DeGeneres took to the stage last night to host the 2014 Academy Awards and one joke made by the comedian about actress Liza Minnelli has transgender advocates seeing red.

“Hello to the best Liza Minnelli impersonator I’ve ever seen,” DeGeneres joked about the icon who has been a favorite subject for female impersonators and drag artists over the years. “Good job, sir.”

As the Washington Post (who referred to Minnelli as a "rumored plastic surgery devotee") notes, a number of people took to Twitter to express their outrage, calling the comment "transphobic." Prominent director Bruce LaBruce was among those to be critical of the Minnelli joke.

DeGeneres is the latest celebrity to come under fire for what some perceived as committing an offense to the transgender community.

"Jared Leto scored his first Oscar on Sunday night, taking home Best Supporting Actor for his role in "Dallas Buyers Club" as Rayon, an HIV-positive transgender woman living in Texas in the 1980s. Many in the transgender community are questioning why a straight, white male actor had the role in the first place, while others are taking issue with the fact that he did not thank the transgender community in his acceptance speech.

Jared Leto gets prestigious award & status for a role in transface, but trans women of color are struggling to stay alive. #transmisogyny— k. (@kulandaybarrett) March 3, 2014

There's a trans actress out there somewhere who could've brought real dignity to Jared Leto's role & she is shaking her damn head right now.— Robin (@caulkthewagon) March 3, 2014

I mean after taking a role that could've been played by a trans woman, mentioning them was kinda the least Jared Leto could've done. Sigh.— Steph Guthrie (@amirightfolks) March 3, 2014

Cis men like Jared Leto have their pick of roles in Hollywood. Meanwhile, trans* actors are rarely considered… http://t.co/gqPrSZn7MW— Racebending.com (@racebending) March 3, 2014

this has been said but let's not forget that jared leto accepted an oscar for playing a trans woman without thanking trans people #Oscars— anaïs e-m (@anaees) March 3, 2014

Jos Truitt of the blog Feministing wrote: "I have no interest in watching a cis man in drag play a trans woman ever again. No matter what Dallas Buyers Club does as a film, the narrative around this movie, the fact that a man in drag is playing a trans woman, perpetuates the stereotype that we are men in drag."

Putting such stereotypes in context, Time's Steve Friess compared Leto's portrayal of a transgender woman to the offensive "mammy" role popular in early 20th century cinema.

Although Rayon might not have been a real person, there were -- and still are -- many just like her.

“Leto’s portrayal was of a particular fictional transgender person at a particular time," Mara Keisling, executive director at the National Center for Transgender Equality, said Monday. "But we can’t forget that transgender people like Rayon did exist and do exist.”

The "My So-Called Life" star has taken heat for the role before.

During a Q&A at the Santa Barbara Film Festival in February, Leto was heckled and accused of "trans-misogyny" for portraying the transgender Rayon. While the heckler took issue with the fact that a trans actor was not cast for the role, the 42-year-old actor said that ideology would then prevent members of the gay community from portraying straight characters."

Liza Minnelli's Answer: Ah well, I think she thought it would be funny, and uh, but she never stopped after she said it and said "My friend, Liza Minnelli." So I think it went a little astray on her. I don't think she meant any harm at all. And she's a wonderful lady, and I think she did great."